


All the Days of the End of the World

by Margo_Kim



Category: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Genre: (but suicide in the way that it works in Edge of Tomorrow to reset the cycle), Character Study, Death, F/M, Gen, Groundhog Day, Pre-Canon, Suicide, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 21:05:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2826086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rita signed up to fight and, yes, maybe even die for her family, her country, or her world, but <i>this</i> is so far beyond the bounds of what she thought would be asked of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Days of the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ferggirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferggirl/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I tried hard to keep the angst and death inherent to Rita's life in the time loop from becoming overwhelming, so I hope it's not too bleak a gift. (There was definitely a point where I went, "How did I possibly think I could make this plot happy," and tried to rethink everything.) I hope you like it! You had some great prompts :)
> 
> (But in addition to this story, I've got a bonus gift for you with a slightly different vibe, [in the form of the other plot idea story that I was working on.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2845685) Rita's life before the movie was very inspiring.)

Day 0

“You look more chipper than I feel,” Marsh told Rita when she woke.

Rita rolled out of bed and starting making the sheets. “I’m not chipper.”

“True,” Hendricks said from his own bunk, rubbing his neck as he stretched. “Never seen a human less chipper than Vrataski.”

“You’ve known me two days,” Rita said.

“And you’ve been not chipper for both of them.”

“Look at her,” Marsh said. “She’s practically beaming this morning compared to the rest of us.”

“Because you two look like corpses,” Jones shouted at them as she jogged past them to the bathroom before roll call.

“Piss off!” Hendricks called after her, and Jones laughed and said, “Yeah, mate, that’s the plan.”

Marsh pointed at Rita who was already nearly dressed. “You’re excited for battle, aren’t you?”

Rita fixed her cap low on her forehead. “You’re damn right.”

Hendricks rolled his eyes and shot Marsh a glance. “God save us from the eagerness of volunteers.”

Marsh was wrong. The fact that Rita volunteered for this war didn’t make the prospect of dying any less shit. Almost more so, actually, she thought to herself as her sergeant finished strapping her into this damn suit. That she volunteered means that she had no one to blame but herself, and so she did, intensely, as she marched on board the ship that will ferry her to Verdun. In the privacy of her own mind, she’d be as much of a coward as she damn well pleased.

Her last thought as the giant Mimic’s blood starts to melt her skin is that at least she died like soldiers ought to. At least she took one of the bastards down with her.

 

Day 1

“You look more chipper than I feel,” Marsh told Rita when she woke.

Rita jerked out of bed, taking the pillow and blanket with her and sprawled on the floor. Her hands grasped at the concrete floors of the barracks and then at the untainted flesh of her own body.

“You alright there, Vrataski?” Hendricks said as he stood from his own bunk, unsure if he was supposed to rush over or not.  

“I died,” Rita breathed.

Hendricks and Marsh exchanged a look.

“I’m alive.” Rita kept running her hands over her face. There was skin where there shouldn’t be skin. That thought above all other kept ringing in her head. She’d felt it melt away.

“You don’t look too good,” Marsh said, her brow lined with worry.

“You look almost as bad as us,” Hendricks said.

“Because you two look like corpses,” Jones shouted at them as she jogged past them to the bathroom before roll call.

“Piss off!” Hendricks called after her, and Jones laughed and said, “Yeah, mate, that’s the plan,” and Rita interrupted everyone by slapping herself senseless.

She still suited up when they ordered her out. As Hendricks fastened her in, Rita stared at him with wild feverish eyes that he avoided. “When you hit the ground, run,” she said.

He still didn’t look at her. But when he hit the ground, she saw him run like he hadn’t run before, and for a moment she was so overwhelmed with confusion and relief that she scarcely felt the freighter explode behind her until it was too late to matter.

 

Day 2

“You look more chipper than I feel,” Marsh said and Rita punched her in the face.

 

Day 3

“You don’t understand!” she shouted as her squadmates dragged her down the hall. “I’ve lived this before! We’re all going to die! You’re all going to die! They’re ready for us! All this has already happened!”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Vrataski?” Hendricks asked. She broke his nose and then his grip, and ran. She made it all the way out of the barracks before—

 

Day 4

She made it all the way out of the barracks and paused for the speeding truck to pass. That pause gave Hendricks enough time to catch her around the waist. She’d screaming so hard that she felt like she’d pop her own eardrums. _You’re hysterical_ , said the soldier in her, the bit that never ever really shut up. _This is interesting. You’ve never been hysterical before. Is this is person you want to be?_

The soldier in her could go fuck herself. In the last two minutes, she’d been reborn, died, and reborn again. In the last two minutes by her reckoning. Who the hell could even count empirically? She’d died four times and she was living to tell the tale, what the hell did that even mean? Was this hell? Oh god, was this hell?

And now she was kneeling, her forehead pressed against the cool concrete ground. Hendricks was still holding her around the waist. She thought about pushing him off, but she didn’t think about it very hard. The weight of him grounded her. Her arms were wrapped around his.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was hysterical.”

“Goddamn,” he said. “Happens to the best of us.”

She didn’t break his nose this time around. She wondered if that was why he was so forgiving.

“In three hours, we’re going to be slaughtered,” she said.

He tightened arms around her, this brother-in-arms she barely knew. “Have a little faith, Vrataski. You don’t know that.”

 

Day 5

You’re stuck in a time loop?” the army doctor said.

Rita folded her arms and nodded. “As near as I can guess it. I know it sounds crazy.”

The doctor said nothing in disagreement.

“Think of the potential for the IDF,” Rita said. “We can use this against them.”

“Yes,” the doctor said, or more accurately, “Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss,” which was perhaps the most hesitant word she’d ever heard, except for the yes she’d heard in the last cycle when Hendricks had made her talk to the doctor as well.

“You have a cell phone in your left pocket,” she said. As the doctor began to frown, Rita said, “It’s about to ring. It’s Sergeant Ward.”

The doctor jumped when the phone trilled. Rita sat back in her chair and said, “Private Simmons of K Squad twisted his ankle. Ward wants to know if you can patch him up before the push.”

She’d felt so smart then, hadn’t she? She had seen the belief bloom across his face like blood in the water. Rita didn’t know how much he would believe her. Rita didn’t know that he was a zealot.

The moment before the vivisection was about to begin, with the scalpel poised over her chest, Rita got a hand free and slammed Dr. Willibald’s head against the operating table. She’d like to do the same to the other orderlies and nurses in the room, but there was only one way to restart the cycle as far as she knew, and she didn’t have much of a chance for that.  _Fine,_ she thought as she busted out of the hospital through the sixth floor window. She’d have to solve this on her own. Unfortunately, the fall was long enough that she had enough time to wonder what the hell “solving” right now meant.

 

Day 10

Why her? Was that a selfish question to ask? And not the how of it but the why. She didn’t know how she refused to die, but she suspected it had to do with Mimic she’d killed, who’d sprayed her with acidic blood as she died. (Rita read once in a journal that you don’t actually remember pain, you just remember everything that surrounded it. That seemed like shit to Rita. She was fairly certain she remembered how it felt for the flesh to melt off her body.) The more pressing question she had at the moment was the why.

“Was I chosen?” Rita asked Hendricks, who to his credit seemed to be intently listening to the crazy woman in his bunk who seemed to be suffering from a religious crisis. “By God or by fate. Some kind of higher power?” She rubbed the heel of her palm against her forehead. “Or am I just a soldier who needs a superior officer?”

“You got me,” Hendricks said.

“If it’s a gift, I have to use it. But I don’t know how.”

“Yeah, that’s rough.”

“Do I just kill any Mimic I can?”

“That’s what I’m planning to do.”

“There must be something more.”

“Oh, probably.”

She looked at him. Hendricks looked back, a pleasant smile on his face. He was a handsome man, though she hadn’t noticed it originally. Maybe he wasn’t remarkable before you spoke to him. He had black skin and a shaved head, a broken nose and only one ear. Basically he looked as tattered as every soldier here. Sitting this closely, Rita could see his freckles, and they were nice. You could never reasonably call him ugly, no, but he got more attractive the more you spoke to him. It was the intelligent kindness in his eyes. That took time to shine out.

She’d also seen him die four times. That most likely made her sentimental towards his face as well.

“Would you believe me if I said that I’m a time traveler?” Rita asked him.

Hendricks laughed. “I sure as hell would not.” He shrugged. “But whatever gets you through the battle.” 

This time around, he died within two minutes of the landing. Rita lasts another twenty minutes. It was a personal record.

 

Day 26

The worst place you could be was where you knew that you were part of a larger plan, but you didn’t know what that plan was.

Alternatively, the worst place you could be was relieving the battle that kills you again and again, but Rita was thinking big picture.

She was an accident. Rita was sure of that at this point, with a certainty she couldn’t explain beyond, “This doesn’t feel purposeful.” Phrased another way, she might have said, “Destiny wouldn’t include me dying quite so ignobly so many times.” As much as she wanted orders, she wasn’t getting them. So far, all she’d found were exciting new ways to die.

 

Day 31

It turned out it was possible to get bored with your own death.

 

Day 38

“You look more chipper than I feel.”

The battle was bad enough (was horrible, was a slaughter every time), but all that wasted space before the battle, every single conversation had and heard that she’d already endured? Rita wasn’t going to say it was worse, but at least she could shoot the Mimics.

 

Day 46

“Two steps left, then right! Every time!” Rita berated herself as her blood pumped out through the stump of her leg. She saw Hendricks turn in time to stare in horror as she shot her own head off.

 

Day 47

“Why do you keep muttering ‘two steps left’?” Hendricks asked as she fastened him into his suit.

Rita shook her head. “Just trying to get one foot further.”

He didn’t understand that either, but he usually died in the landing anyway. She’d made it nearly half a mile last time. Rita didn’t know where the hell she was going, but she knew she was going to get there.

 

Day 48

She got one foot further. She got her feet blown off anyway. Which didn’t seem very goddamn fair, but what the hell was these days?

 

Day 56

Almost a mile out from the drop site, Rita tripped and landed on a mine.

 

Day 57

Rita laid in her bunk when she woke, and thought very hard about how very, very stupid the end of your life could be. “Thank god death’s not permanent,” she said to herself and laughed while her squadmates avoided her eyes.

 

Day 64

“You look more chipper than I feel.”

“Shut the fuck up, Marsh.”

 

Day 68

“You look more chipper than I feel.”

Rita squeezed her eyes shut and screamed into her pillow.

 

Day 72

The knowledge gap between the two of them seemed a little unethical, but Hendricks had been smiling at her that particular way for god knows how many days now (fifty-six, counting the original go around—Rita wished she could lose track) and when she pressed her lips to his, he didn’t seem unhappy at all. Quite the contrary.

Hardcore snogging in two battlesuits wasn’t easy, of course, but nothing worth doing was.

When he smirked at her on the flight out, two minutes before he died yet again, Rita couldn’t help but wonder if this particular problem in her blood could be passed the same way as other blood-bourn diseases could.

 

Day 73

Rita shouldn’t be surprised that one soldier will happily sleep with another on the eve of battle, but she was still thinking that it would take more than one sentence and her best come-hither look. She admired Hendricks’ efficiency, and then she admired quite a bit more, and then he was pressing a kiss to her sweaty brow before he bumped their foreheads together. His hands were on her waist once more. His weight once again grounded her.

When he died in the landing, the day marched on. So that answered that.

 

Day 74

She was a deserter now. She knew the camp so well at this point, the precise rhythms of this one day beat out so repetitively, that it wasn’t even a challenge. In her stolen car, Rita made it all the way back to Calais. She sat on the hood and watched the fog clear until she could glimpse the White Cliffs of Dover on the other side of the Channel. There was a family of refugees waiting for their ticket to come up. Rita’s French was as poor as their English, but the language of food was universal, and she had an officer’s lunch in the backseat of the car.

And what did it matter, she couldn’t help thinking as the two kids ate, when this day would only restart and she wouldn’t be here tomorrow? It would be as if she’d never fed them at all.

True enough, but on the other hand, she waited until they were gone to shot herself. There was something to be said for letting kindness lie as long as long as you could.

 

Day 75

Fight. Die.

 

Day 76

Fight. Die.

 

Day 77

Fight. Die.

 

Day 78

Rita stole two bottles of whiskey. The rest of B Squad was plenty receptive to it, more than they should have been in the hours before the biggest battle of their lives. Marsh threw up onto Hendricks’ bunk while Jones cried with laughter. While Marsh, blushing and protesting that she normally held her liquor much, _much_ better, stripped the bed to wash the sheets, Hendricks nudged Rita with his shoulder as they sat together on the floor. “Is this what you’d thought it’d be? When you enlisted?”

The dryness of her laugh surprised even herself. “No,” Rita said. “Not at all.” Then she surprised herself again. “I shouldn’t have joined.” She had never said it aloud before. The words tasted strange on her tongue. She wasn’t sure if they were truth or lies, but either way, she felt light-headed for saying them. But then again, maybe that was the whiskey.

Hendricks offered her a warm clasp on the shoulder. “Just think of the why,” he said.

“Every day,” she said. The _why me_ at least.

“No really.” Hendricks gestured to the rest of the squad, a sorry ragtag team that she knew better than they could ever suspect. “We got conscripted, so don’t listen to us. Why did _you_ join?”

Rita downed the rest of her drink in one gulp, and let the impermanence of this day loosen her tongue even more than it already had. “I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save the world.”

“Well then,” Hendricks said like that meant anything, “there’s no better place you could be.” Rita glared at him, and he grinned at her. “Come on, soldier. You’re supposed to be the brave one.”

“Yeah, Vrataski,” Jones drawled from her bunk. “We’re banking on you saving us.”

Rita almost spoke and then didn’t. She poured herself another drink. She thought about the pistol by her bunk and if hangovers could span space and time. “You’re right,” Rita said to Jones, who wasn’t even listening anymore. “I’m gonna save you.”

“And the world too?” Hendricks asked. She wasn’t sure if he was teasing. Didn’t matter. Same answer.

“The world in particular,” Rita said and drank. “I’ve seen how the battle goes. Someone here has to do it.”

 

Day 85

“Save everyone, kill everything,” wasn’t much of a battle plan, Rita thought. But it turned out she figured out the secret to dying good deaths the very first time she did it. If you’ve got to die, do for a reason. If you’ve got to die, make the other bastard bleed first.

 

Day 91

_a bridge. a shadow? a mountain. two mountains. white hills. then more. flying over. flying down. the sea the mediterranean  and then up to the stars. when she looks back down she’s nowhere she’s ever been above something she’s never seen and it’s reaching for her. it’s been looking for her and now it’s reaching back._

For the first time in months, Rita woke up sweating. Her terror had grown so stale. This was vibrant, fresh. “You look more chipper than I feel,” Marsh said when she woke up. Marsh said that almost always time, except one time when she said, “Do you ever hope they’ll just die before we have to get out there,” and one time she said, “Maybe it’s not too late to be deployed to Australia.” Maybe it depended on Rita’s face, that was Rita’s best guess, and this morning, she couldn’t keep the smirk off.

“I am chipper,” Rita said.

“That’s new,” Hendricks said, from his bunk. It was a new day, and everyone lived.

Rita rubbed her head and laughed. “You’ve known me two days.”  

“And you’ve been not chipper for both of them.”

“Look at her,” Marsh said. “She’s practically beaming this morning compared to the rest of us.”

“Because you two look like corpses,” Jones shouted at them as she jogged past. Rita had never seen Jones die on the field. Some people had all the luck, Rita thought and laughed with Jones as she told Hendricks, “Yeah, mate, that’s the plan.”

Marsh pointed at Rita who was still sitting on her bed, wiping away her sweat with her pillow case. “You’re excited for battle, aren’t you?”

Rita threw down the soaked cloth on the floor. “You’re damn right,” she said.

Hendricks, as he always did on days like this, rolled his eyes. “God save us from the eagerness of volunteers.”

“You know me, James,” she said to him as she stood, her tainted blood thrumming with the beginning of, of _something_. “I love the chance to do something new.”

 

Day 106

“You have three fingers behind your back. You have two pens in your left coat pocket. You want to believe me, but think of what it would do to your career after the Montpelier incident. You’re going to sneeze in a moment,” Rita said, her gun still pointed at Dr. Carter’s head as the security alarm rang. “Do you believe me yet?”

Whitehall’s premier expert on Mimic biology, the only one so far that had listened to her at all, sneezed. Then he stared with open amazement, his hands no longer raised in fear but because he was too amazed to lower them. “How could you possibly know that about me?”

All of the Whitehall security team was about to converge on her location (for the seventh time, depending on your perspective), but Rita smiled. It didn’t calm the good doctor down. “I told you. I’ve lived this day before. You always hit the silent alarm.” She could hear the guards’ feet, they were nearly at the door. “What can I say to you next time to make you believe me quicker?”

Dr. Carter’s jaw was slack, but she could see his eyes thinking. “When I was twelve, I tried to build a time machine,” he said. THUD. They were breaking down the door. “I called it the Timester and it was cardboard painted purple. I accidently set it on fire and blamed my brother.” THUD. THUD. CRACK.

“Next time,” she said and shot herself at the same time the guards did as well.

For the first time ever, Rita died giddy with hope.

 

Day 507

None of this would be worth anything, she thought as she bled to death, ultimately not worth one drop of the human blood she’d shed and seen shed. But did she feel good laying in the center of her own carnage, hundreds of dead Mimics splayed around her, a dozen for each one soldier they’d killed?

You better fucking believe it.

Rita was just trying to find enough strength to raise her gun up one last time when the shadow passed over her face. The roar of a helicopter. The thud of boots hitting the ground around her. “We’ve got you,” someone said, their hands on her body, pulling her arms down to her side. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

 _No, no, no_ , she tried to say, but she couldn’t make her mouth work, no matter how hard she tried. And maybe she could have tried harder. But she was tired. She was so very tired. Rita couldn’t stop herself from slipping sideways into the peaceful dark. If she’d been more scared, she would have fought. But death didn’t impress her much these days.

 

“You’re a hero,” Marsh told Rita when she woke in the hospital bed, and Rita knew without having to be told that the power was gone. She felt like how the tightwalker must, when they look down and see that someone’s removed the net—the kind of thing that was never supposed to be safe and now suddenly wasn’t again.

There’d be time for regret later. Regret and mourning and rage and planning. In the gap between waking and realizing, after the sleep and before the horror when she saw someone else’s blood dripping into her veins, before she could think about all the work still left undone, all Rita thought this: No one could say she wasn’t brave now. And in the privacy of her own mind, no one had to know how glad she was to be done.

She’d count the dead later. She’d avenge them too. But right now, with her head pounding like she barely remembered it could without having a bullet in it first, she closed her eyes and let a little death swell up to take her in the form of, finally, sleep.


End file.
